The American Medical Association Should Help Patients. Instead, It's Policing Language.Protectionist policies are why the U.S. has few physicians and high prices.
By John Stossel
February 23, 2022
The American Medical Association now tells doctors: Use woke language! It's issued a 54-page guide telling doctors things like, don't say "equality"; say "equity." Don't say "minority"; say "historically marginalized."
Much of the AMA's advisory sounds like Marxism: "Expose…property rights…Individualism is problematic…Corporations…limit prospects for good health…people underpaid and forced into poverty as a result of banking policies."
This is too much even for some on the left, like writer Matthew Yglesias, whose article about the AMA caught my attention.
"Can you imagine anyone actually doing this?" asks Yglesias in my new video. "What would happen if you were in a clinical setting, and somebody starts giving you this lecture about landowners?…Nobody practices medicine like that, and it wouldn't be helpful to anybody!"
He points out that while the AMA now tells doctors to call poor neighborhoods "systematically divested," not "poor," it has long lobbied for things that hurt poor people, like restricting the number of doctors.
The U.S. has fewer doctors than other countries. Per person, Austria has twice as many.
"We have the best paid physicians in the world and the scarcest physicians in the world," says Yglesias. "That's not a coincidence."
* * *
Source:
https://reason.com/2022/02/23/the-american-medical-association-should-help-patients-instead-its-policing-language/
